


New Perspective

by illialife



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Affairs, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Existential Crisis, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Implied Past Hunk/Lance, Keith has Glasses, Lazy Eye AU, M/M, Older Characters, Past Relationship(s), Years Later
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-17 20:14:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10601391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illialife/pseuds/illialife
Summary: After getting an email from an old flame for the first time in fifteen years, Keith invites them back into his life. Resulting in a passionate weekend in the desert, as well as other prospects coming into sharp focus, jarring how Keith really views his current situation.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Based off of a very enjoyable and beautifully shot movie, Lazy Eye. Watch it on Netflix!

Keith Kogane had always been known for having shit eyesight. His eyes had done their job pretty well until that one fateful day in second grade when the board suddenly didn’t make much sense anymore and his classmates’ individual features dissolved into a sea of faces. Eye appointment after eye appointment riddled his entire life after that. One could say he was a pro when it came to the optometrist slowly pulling the phoropter over his eyes and saying, “Tell me what you see,” with “Number one or two?” falling close behind and a click of a switch flipping the lenses in front of his eyes. These appointments became clockwork, which is why Keith finds himself seated in the familiar dark room with the cumbersome optometry tool resting on the tip of his long, curved nose.

  
The doctor repeats himself in that same calm and steady voice, “One or two?”

  
“Two,” Keith says bluntly, the letters across from him slowly sharpening.

  
“Good,” the doctor says, reaching up to then twist something on the machine, “Read the bottom line for me.” Keith took a moment and dully read off a line of slightly blurry letters.

  
“V -L- O- R- T- N- O.”

  
“Wonderful,” the doctor fiddles with a knob above Keith’s left eye. A black shutter falls into place and shields Keith’s line of sight. “Now the right eye, can you read that?" Keith grits his teeth. His right eye has always been more of a pain to deal with than his left eye. Keith looks anyway and is met with nothing but a black blur where he assumes the line of text is supposed to be.

“Nope.”

  
“Really?” He hears the doctor say while scribbling down on his paper, “Nothing at all?”

  
“Nothing,” Keith deadpans back. He feels the optometrist lean forward and change something. Instantly, the letters come into view, not clearly, but at least they have a recognizable shape.

  
“Is that a…” Keith tries to lean forward, then remembers that he has a huge monstrosity of a machine that is tethered to the ceiling on his face and opts to pull his feet towards his chair instead, trying to internalize the slight embarrassment. He struggles, clenching and unclenching his fingers, knowing that his fidgeting will not miraculously restore his horrible vision, but it does help him focus anyway. His eye traces over the harsh angles of the symbol in front of him.

  
“Is that a K?” he questions. He feels the doctor adjust the phoropter again. _Well, I guess that’s a no._

  
“And here?” the doctor said, adjusting the right side again. Nothing changed, the letters still remained fuzzy. Keith's teeth worry his bottom lip while he strains to make sense of the first letter. He has always approached these eye exams as a competition between him and his shitty eyesight. The goal was to get as close as possible without the doctor changing the lens prescription on him. He would try to remember the order of how the letters would appear (even though this was not beneficial for him in the long run), as well as see how fast and accurate he could be. This notion he had was partially due to his competitive nature, as well as his stubbornness.

  
Sometimes, he still refused to acknowledge the fact that he needed glasses to see. Keith looks at the letter, sizing it up. He honestly wonders if the doctor is playing with him right now and what’s up on the projector for him isn’t even a letter. Hell, it could straight up be a dick on the screen and Keith wouldn’t be able to tell. Bringing his attention back to the letter, what his right eye is able to distinguish is the strong vertical line that makes up the innermost structure of the character. Now, he’s debating on whether it’s a “T” or an “I” or an “L”. Keith’s never been lucky when it comes to random guesses.

  
“L?” The doctor adjusts the phoropter for a third time. _Damn it._

  
“And this one?” Keith looks hopelessly at the blurred figure. After a long pause, a sigh escapes his nose. This is concerning. Keith’s been “blind” for a long time, but it’s never been this bad. Usually, on the second try, everything is all fine and dandy. Apparently not today. This sends Keith into a slight panic, that anxiety that most people with bad eyesight have when visiting the optometrist. The thought that there is something truly wrong with his eye and that there is nothing available to fix it. That he somehow has contracted some unknown eye complication. He knows this is nonsense, but the fear is still lingering in the back of his mind.

“F?” He hears the doctor sigh and feels the phoropter being pulled from his face. He turns to meet the doctor’s eyes, or where he assumes his eyes are.

  
“You have Amblyopia.” It’s not a question. Keith breaks eye contact focusing on the blurry blob that is his clasped hands. Keith raises his eyebrows and sighs.

  
“Yeah.”

  
“You didn’t indicate it on your medical history form,” Comes the doctor’s disgruntled reply. Keith scoffs at that.

  
“Well, didn’t want to brag.” He forces a smile and turns back toward the doctor.

  
“When did you first take notice?”

  
“My grandmother noticed when I was around seven. My right eye was drifting.” God, Keith loathed doctor interactions. He knew it was for his own personal benefit, but he hated that they prodded their patients into telling them everything about anything. Hell, Keith hated human interactions in general. He nervously tucked a dark hair that had escaped his small ponytail behind his ear. He then decided to focus on the blurry right corner of the small office.

  
“I meant a more recent incident, sorry.” Keith directed his attention back towards the doctor’s voice.

  
“Oh,” Keith steeled his face into he hoped was a neutral expression, “‘Bout a couple weeks ago. I was working on my laptop and everything went soft.” Keith’s jaw tightened.

  
“Was it up close, or from a distance?”

  
Keith recalled the moment. The weight of his glasses on the tip of his nose. The softness of his bed sheets underneath him. The emptiness of the large mattress. The laptop warm upon his bare chest. The sirens of passing police cars. The email that had appeared in his inbox, the subject line filled with “a ghost from the past”. From a name, he thought he would never see again. _Lance Álvarez_.

  
“Keith.” The doctor’s steady voice was like a knife cutting Keith away from his reverie. Keith shakes his head and turns to the doctor again.

  
“Pardon?”

  
“When everything went soft… Was it from a distance or up close or both?” The doctor awaits Keith’s answer. It doesn’t take Keith long to respond this time.

  
“Both.” Though he’s sitting in a dark doctor’s room physically, mentally he is still letting that name drift in the void that he calls his mind. He feels his face fall into a more melancholy expression. He can’t help it. His brows furrow. The doctor continues unaware of Keith’s delayed responses.

  
“Okay, the good news is, your right eye, the amblyopic one, hasn’t changed. You have some vision there,” Keith just watches the blob that is the doctor’s mouth move with his words.

  
“But there has been a change in your good eye. Do you sit in front of a computer all day?” the doctor asks, handing Keith back his glasses. Keith takes them from him. He laughs.

  
“No need to make it sound that exciting.” Keith brings the frames to his face and places them where they belong, weight familiar along the bridge of his nose. The world comes into focus. He forces another smile.

  
“What do you do?”

  
“I’m a graphic designer,” he deadpans, lips a thin line. “Is it serious?”

  
“No, but I do think it’s time for you to move to progressive lenses.” The doctor’s face is enthusiastic, now that Keith can actually see his facial features. _Progressive lenses?_

  
“You mean… bifocals?”

  
The doctor chuckles.

  
“More like trifocals, but don’t worry, it’s perfectly normal for people to experience a dramatic change in vision around middle age.” Keith feels like he’s been hit upside the head with a club. _Middle aged?_ The dawning realization rests upon his shoulders as he studies the white paint on the wall opposite of him. He guesses he is considered that now, being thirty-nine years old. It still leaves him hollow.

* * *

  
“Are they horrible?” Keith asks from his office chair, new frames resting on his nose. Pidge laughs as she messes with the tea bag hanging out of her mug that reads in bold letters “I Need My Space”.

  
“They’re awesome, Four-Eyes,” she takes a sip, lips jumping away when she realizes the tea is scalding.

  
“Ack!” She narrowly avoids the hot liquid that successfully escaped the mug and with a splash, collides with the wooden floor. Keith snickers at her antics. He crosses his legs and swivels to follow Pidge as she walks his office.

  
“That’s rich coming from you,” Keith said pointing an index finger towards Pidge’s own circular frames perched on the slope of her round nose. She sticks her tongue out in retaliation.

  
“But seriously,” Keith continues, watching Pidge blow across the top of her tea. “You think… You think they don’t make me look like I’m trying to hard?” Keith reaches to mess with his new glasses. The frames are a clear plastic with large square frames, so they essentially disappear on his face. Keith’s used to hiding behind his glasses though. Pidge turns to him and blows her mass of curly, short, copper hair out of her face. She rolls her honey-colored eyes and proceeds to attempt another sip of her tea.

  
“Please, when have you ever been a try-hard, Keith?” She is successful and the steam from the mug fogs up her frames, as she savors the taste, a smile stretches her mouth. Keith bites his lip.

“Plus,” she walks over and places her mug on Keith’s spotless desk. “Now we can really see how pretty your eyes are-” she goes for a sip, “No, hetero.” Keith lets a smirk fall across his features. Keith has known Pidge since his freshman year in college. She was a digital arts major, while he was graphic design major and they had hit it off when Pidge claimed that American feet had never touched the moon’s surface.

  
“There’s a reason why NASA is interested in interning a digital arts major,” She had stated matter of factly. Bonding over conspiracies and coffee the rest of the night ensued from there. Which then resulted in them becoming nearly inseparable. Pidge’s witty banter always kept him on his toes and he felt that his relationship with Pidge would be the closest thing he would ever get to having a sibling. She was also the first person he had ever wanted to share that he was gay with. Not that he ever hid it, but she was easy to confide in. When he had told her this, she had laughed and stated a simple “I already knew, gays tend to flock together” and here they were now fifteen years later and still close friends. 

  
Keith sighs, “I don’t get it.” Pidge watches him from over the rims of her glasses as she takes another sip.

  
“The top part is distance, the bottom’s close, but the middle is this weird limbo place where nothing is in focus.” Keith tilts his head up and down trying to emphasize the annoyance of having what seemed like five different prescriptions in one lens. Pidge laughs into her mug.

  
“You gotta use your nose, Kogane,” she says simply. Keith tries to meet her eyes.

  
“What?”

  
Pidge sighs, Keith does not miss her huge eye roll. She places her mug down and walks to his chair.

  
“Turn around,” she says while already swiveling his chair, “You gotta point your nose at the thing you’re trying to see.” She takes Keith’s head in her hands and directs him to the computer screen.

  
“Point my nose?”

  
“Yeah, your big pointy nose-”

  
“My nose is anything but big!” Keith huffs out indignantly, causing Pidge to laugh.

  
“Yeah, yeah, just try it, Keith.” She releases her grasp. Keith does just that, he tries, resulting in a blurry image. He tries again, but he honestly feels more nauseous than before. Anger wraps itself around a frustrated sigh. Pidge pulls at Keith’s dark hair.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it in time.” She goes back to her tea, scoops it up into her thin fingers and travels to the window to watch passersbys in the parking lot below. Keith brings his hands to his hair and cards his fingers through it.

“You know,” he turns to Pidge, whose gaze is still out the window.

“What?”

“I think I’m going blind.”

  
“Now you sound pathetic, Kogane. But I think we both know what caused your “blindness”.” He scoffs at that, fingers tapping the arms of his chair.

  
“Anywho,” Pidge starts walking back to the front of Keith’s desk to sit down. “I don’t wanna throw the baby on the fire, or whatever the fuck the expression is, but Allura called.” Keith stiffens and meets Pidge’s eyes. She fiddles with her tea bag.

  
“And?”

  
“Remember when she wanted graphic, minimalist, simple-”

  
“That’s what we gave them.” Keith cuts Pidge off, honestly confused.

  
“She doesn’t want that anymore.” Pidge continues bluntly, watching an array of emotions travel over Keith’s face before it settles back into its default neutral expression. He crosses his arms.

  
“What does she want?”

  
“You’re not going to love it…” Pidge drawls out, placing her mug down. She then vanishes from Keith’s view as she bends downward to grab something. Keith thinks back to his client and the typical discourse that he had with her over the graphic that was used for her movies. Keith’s eyes widen with realization. He tilts his head.

  
“Not three heads in the sky.” He says, almost pleading.

  
“It is not three heads in the sky, but it is two now,” Pidge replies, hair fluffier than ever and a mock print of the movie graphic grasped in her hands. The print consisted of three gorgeous actor busts looking off into the distance dramatically, which gradually faded into a generic landscape underneath them. The actress on the far left had a crudely drawn red “X” across her face, courtesy of Pidge. Keith put his hands together and takes a deep breath.

  
“Pidge, correct me if I’m wrong but, didn’t we do a two heads in the sky version like…” He twirls his hands, searching the archives of his brain, “Six versions ago?”

  
“No, we did three heads,” Pidge says dully, placing the mock sheet on the desk next to her cup.

  
“Christ, now they want two.” Keith looks to Pidge for confirmation.

  
“Heads,” she clarifies, eyeing her tea.

  
“In the sky.” Keith grits his teeth, trying to remain composed.

  
“Floating over a generic landscape, that’s not even in the movie, I know.” She takes a sip. Keith groans, running his hands over his face. Fingers trace over his thick frames and he takes off his glasses. He crosses his arms over his desk and buries his face into them. He pounds a fist on the desk, disturbing the paperwork on it.

  
“Oh, fuck me.”

  
“Thanks for the offer, but I’ll pass for now.” Pidge deadpans back, a frown coming across her face as she realizes her mug has been emptied of its contents. Pidge turns to Keith, who lets out a muffled sigh.

  
“Pidge, why do they make us go through so many rounds, only to be like, never mind y’all, we want something safe?”

  
“I don’t know, Mr. Southern Hospitality, but they do and they’re a good client and they keep our lights on. What do I tell them?” Although she already knew his response. Keith lifts his face, a flash of frustration courses through him. He straightens up to rest his back violently against the office chair and raises his arms above his head in exasperation.

  
“Y’know what? Tell her that the other design was better. Tell her that nobody goes to see a movie because of the one sheet, ever. In fact, you can tell her that in the list of reasons that people go to see movies, the one sheet is at the very bottom, so why not do something good, for once. Something that will outlive her shitty movie.” He’s breathing heavily now, all the pent up emotion from the past few weeks finally breaking through. He stares at a blurry Pidge. She doesn’t even bat an eye. He’s sure that she can feel the irritation wafting from him.

  
“Tell me what’s wrong.”

  
“What,” Keith states, face falling neutral as he places his glasses back on his face, pinching the bridge of his nose.

  
“You’ve just been walking around here for the last two weeks in this weird funky state, like you’ve got a stick up your ass. Talk to me, idiot.” While her words are harsh, her eyes are not.

  
“Yeah, no, I know, I know, I just…” Keith rests his chin on the palm of his hand and avoids Pidge’s gaze. He shifts nervously, rubbing his neck with his opposite hand.

  
“I got um…” He forces a smile, tongue tracing his teeth and he meets Pidge’s eyes with a scoff, more at himself than her. “I just think I need to take a couple of days off.”

  
“Yeah?” Pidge raises a skeptical eyebrow.

  
“I think I’m gonna drive out to the desert tonight.” Keith adjusts his crossed legs, fingers in a tight clasp so they no longer fidget. Keith’s eyes shift from his computer and back to her. Pidge notices. He swallows.

  
“Awesome, let’s go to the conspiracy shack for the weekend. We can swim, get wasted, stargaze...” She lists the usual activities off watching for Keith’s reaction. “It’ll be great.” Keith stiffens at her suggestion. His jaw tightens as he meets her eyes.

  
“I’m sorry Pidge, I meant by myself. I need some time to um, clear my head.” His eyes drift back down to his hands.

  
“Okay.” She studies his face.

  
“Sorry.” It’s a weak apology.

  
“It’s fine, four-eyes. I do need you to finish these revisions though.” Pidge finally decides that it would be best to leave him be. She taps a finger on the movie poster.

  
“Okay, I’ll do them tonight at home.” Keith watches as Pidge stands, mug in tow.

  
“Cool beans,” falls from her lips as she makes her way to the door of the office.

  
“What happened to the third head anyway?” Keith asks as he picks up the mock print and points to the actress, trying to disperse the awkwardness lingering in the office.

  
“I don’t know. The other heads have better agents. Don’t forget to point your nose.” And with that Pidge is gone, leaving Keith even more frustrated with himself than before.

**Author's Note:**

> Leave a comment on your way out!


End file.
